How to analyze competitive salary with Indeed Analytics (includes video)
Competitive salary for your employees
How do I determine whether I am paying my employees competitively? This is a very common question that many business owners and entrepreneur ask themselves. In the present day and age where talent retention is one of the most important attributes for the success of a company, it is essential that small business employers stay competitive with the market to stay ahead in the game. Aside from this, another important consideration is the skill sets needed for a particular job. The more specialized a skill set, the higher the job salary. In all of this, the part that makes it really challenging is that the small business owners are not only competing with other small business owners, but they’re also competing with large corporations with many more resources who require the same talent. It is imperative for business owners to continuously analyze the competition and research salaries in the market to ensure they are paying their employees appropriately.
There are several things that go into employee hiring and retention. Check out my blog on end-to-end hiring which lists out all the steps from sourcing talent to employee retention in detail. Very few employers realize that they can hire great talent and stay competitive without having to spend a fortune if they can make time to do some research.
There are several ways to do this research. A simple and good technique is to make calls to the local businesses in your area who hire similar talent to find out how much they are paying their employees. They may or may not be willing to share this info. Looking at jobs posted on popular job boards like Indeed, Zip Recruiter and analyzing the salary and benefits other business owners are offering is another way.
While there’s so much you can do in terms of research, I wanted to talk about a tool that has helped me vastly with hiring for my business – Indeed Analytics – Hiring Insights. There’s a wealth of information on the Indeed Analytics portal that is a great resource for employer’s hiring toolkit. Employers can see at a glance the job climate in their local areas, general pay scales, their biggest competitors and also compare these attributes with other geographical areas. This is a powerful tool when making business expansion decisions as well.
Below I’ve given step-by-step instructions on how to do this analysis using Indeed Analytics – Hiring Insights. I’ve also included a video which walks through these steps.
Step 1: Accessing Hiring Insights
Go to the employers page on Indeed site. Hiring Insights is part of the Indeed Employers site.
Once on the Indeed Employers page, you will be required to log in to the site using your user id and password. If you do not have one, you can create an account for free.
Click on Analytics menu item in the left menu bar and select “Hiring Insights” option.
Step 2: Entering search criteria
Let’s say you have a hair salon business in the Denver area and you are looking to analyze the pay scale for hair stylists.
You would select the country, enter the job title and then enter the location, which in this case is Denver and click on “Generate Report”
Step 3: Analyze analytics panels
Once the report is generated, you’ll see a lot of great information on the page.
Panel Controls to the left allows you to toggle panels on and off. I’ll be keeping all the panels on for the purpose of this exercise.
There are two sections: Market Insights and Candidate Insights. Let’s review some of the key items one by one.
Trends panel:
Trends panel shows you the weekly growth percentage data comparing it with a week before the pandemic. For example, in from the chart below, we can see:
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There are 29% more jobs for hair stylists than in the week before the pandemic
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There are 9% more candidates seeking jobs in the Hair Stylists category than the week before the pandemic
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There are 16% less job seekers per job in the Hair Stylists category than the week before the pandemic
Competition Score panel:
As the name suggests, this shows the competition for the job title for the preceding three months for the given area compared to the rest of the country.
Jobs panel
Shows the number of Hair Stylists jobs posted on Indeed in the given month that have received clicks. This goes hand-in-hand with the Competition panel and tells you how many jobs your job posts will be competing with.
Job Seekers and Job Seekers per Job panels:
Job Seekers panel shows the number of unique visitors that clicked on Hair Stylists job title in the given month in the Denver area. Job seekers per job is number of job seekers per Hair Stylists job title in the Denver area.
Candidate Devices and Average Salary panels
You can see that most of the clicks for Hair Stylists job title came from mobile devices, i.e most candidates viewed and clicked on the job post from their phones. This is helpful when you think of the various channels through which you post your job ads. Ensuring that your job ads are mobile optimized is a good consideration.
This is a very key metric. You can see that there is a range of salaries offered in Denver market for hair stylists job and the average salary is $27.25/ hour. Some of your competitors might be paying as low as $7.25/ hour and others as high as $69.80/ hour. Ensuring you are close to the average is a good sign that you are offering competitive salary to your employees.
Another important piece of information to look at here is that the average hourly pay for Hair Stylists in Denver is almost 63% higher than the national average. This also indicates high levels of competition and demand for this skill set in the Denver area.
Top Search Terms by Clicks panel:
This panel provides helpful insights on the most popular search terms that led to most clicks for Hair Stylists job ads in the Denver area in the given month. When posting job posts, ensuring these terms are included in the title of your job posts will ensure more clicks from candidates.
Top Employers by Clicks panel:
This panel shows the most popular employers that received most clicks for Hair Stylists job ads in the Denver aeea in the given month. This is a great indicator of who your top competitors are when it comes to hiring. Clicking on the employer will take you to their job posting on Indeed. Analyzing their job posts for salary, benefits and offerings can help you create a competitive salary and benefits offerings for your employees.
Most Common Employers and Most Common Locations panels:
The Most common employers panel shows the most commonly listed employers on candidates resumes with the job title of Hair Stylist in Denver area. This again gives you an idea about which other employers are your biggest competitors.
The most common locations panel shows the most commonly listed locations on candidates’ resumes with Hair Stylist job titles in the Denver area in the given month.
Analyzing hiring insights can not only help you create competitive job posts but also help assess your employees’ salary and benefits and ensure that the package you are offering is a compelling and competitive one. Whether you are hiring new employees or analyzing pay scales of existing employees, Indeed Analytics is a great tool to have in your toolkit.
